The Contraversialist Blog that aims to bring you the most provocative and fearless opinion on the topics of the day. Daily Stirrer contributors write from the heart and shoot from the hip on all the topics that are making news. They will tackle business and politics, bureucracy, health society, science and technology. education, transport and any other issue where the media conspire with the money men to make sure the difficult questions are not being asked ...Creative Commons: Some rights reserved (non commercial, attrib, no derivs.All reproductions in whole or in part should link to Greenteeth Multi Media Productions http://www.greenteeth.com/index

In some ways the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition has made quite a good start in government. One area they are set to fail badly however is energy. Driven by politically correct thinking the coalition are set to follow Labour down the road that goes through wind power and eventually leads nowhere. Wind turbines look fine on paper. If they generate at their optimum output for 365 days a year the contribution to energy needs looks like a viable business proposition. The problem is due to the limitations of the technology and the vagaries of the weather wind farms are doing well if they operate at a quarter of their potential output.

15 August 2010
Today's News

According to figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions, 889,000 people have spent the last ten years on sickness benefits, costing an average of Ł4.2billion a year.

The welfare minister Chris Grayling said that the number of people on sickness benefit would be reduced through a new assessment system.

The sheer amount of people who have been left behind without any help or support to get back into work is outrageous, said Mr Grayling. Under Labour, thousands of people who have simply been cast aside by a welfare system that does nothing but put them in a queue for benefits and then forgets about them.

Under the current rules, someone can be paid benefits for up to 13 weeks before being formally assessed by a medical examiner.

This is all very well but we were under the impression that chronically ill and disabled people are often not capable of working. Shouldn't the assessments be aimed at the lazy buggers who have been on the dole for ten years?

A Ł520 million scheme promised to give elderly people and those with disabilities more control over the care they received, by passing on cash so individuals could choose the services they needed, such as home help, or mobility aids is causing a few raised eyebrows.

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An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph can disclose that exotic holidays, internet dating subscriptions and adventure breaks, as well as visits to sex workers and lap dancing clubs have been permitted under the system.

One local authority has agreed a care plan including payment for a 21-year-old with learning disabilities to have sex with a prostitute in Amsterdam next month.

We think this is taking things a bit far. After all the money they have spent patrolling red light areas, hutting down brothels and massage parlours and naming and shaming kerb crawlers it looks like different rules for different people.

The new commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, Gen David Petraeus, says he will not be bound by a 2011 target date to start withdrawing US troops. Speaking on NBC television, Gen Petraeus said he reserved the right to tell President Obama whether the pull-out date was too early.

He was speaking after US forces endured their deadliest month in July since the Afghan conflict began in 2001. Gen Petraeus said the Afghan mission was tough and would remain so.

President Barack Obama set the 2011 withdrawal date at the same time as he announced the troop surge intended to end Taliban resistance.

Looks like Petraeus has read some history books but Obie hasn't. The Daily Stirrer predicted ahead of the announcement of Obama's troop surge it would only lead to higher allied casualties and a more ignominious end to the war.

14 August 2010
Today's News
Posting has been sparse this past few days because we have been experiencing problems with our internet hosting service. Back to normal next week we hop. Meanwhile here are todays stories on debt, the financial crisis and payday loans; Obama's politically suicidal decision to support the building of a Mosque near the site of the World Trade Centre, the end of the Oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico and a plan to put many of Britain's nature reserves and national assests into the care of provate organisations.
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13 August 2010
Today's News

A couple of health related stories today, one concerning the likely effects of cuts in the NHS and the other about that old favourite, obesity.

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12 August 2010
Todays News

The Middle East, Fears for the recovery as stock markets fall and a new health hazard dominate the news today.

Todays News 12 August 2010
Iraq Not Ready For US Pullout Another setback for the Obama Presidency and another demonstration of Barack Obama's foreign policy cluelessness. Having tried to bolster his poll ratings, which have been in freefall recently, by making a big thing of the military pullout from Iraq, first it was revealed that the pullout was not in fact a military withdrawal but simply a rebranding of the operation.
Now we learn that Obama is being told by Iraqi leaders and his own senior military officers Iraq is not ready for a pullout of American troops even if it is not really a pullout and that Al Qaeda are once more operational in Iraq and are recruiting militiamen from among the people trained and equipped by the US 'advisers'.

The script said that after the 'pullout' troop numbers will not fall by very much their mission will not be to impose political change but to treain and advise Iraqi security forces. Yeah right.

World Stock Markets On High Alert
Stock markets around the world remained nervous today after yesterday's sharp falls, amid lingering fears about the global economy's recovery from recession.
In London, the FTSE 100 index turned positive after falling 18 points in early trading, trading up 4.25 points at 5249.47. Yesterday it suffered its biggest drop for six weeks, closing down 131.2 points at 5245.21, a fall of 2.44%.
Marc Ostwald, strategist at Monument Securities, said there had been "a lot of unwinding of positions, a general exit from risk assets" yesterday but noted that trading volumes were thin. He told finance journalists: In a thin market everything gets....

George Osborne May Have Saved Britain's Credit Rating But.... The coalition government leaders told us deficit reduction was urgent if Britain was to avoid having its credit rating cut and thus having to pay more interest on money borrowed to finance shortfalls in revenue. This was absolutely true but there was always a downside...

NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like E.coli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of antibiotics - carbapenems. These are generally reserved for use in emergencies and to combat hard-to-treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bacteria.

And experts fear NDM-1 could now jump to other strains of bacteria that are already resistant to many other antibiotics. Ultimately, this could produce dangerous infections that would spread rapidly from person to person and be almost impossible to treat.

"The worlds first robot to be able to display and detect emotions has been unveiled by European scientists. The humanoid machine, called Nao, hunches its shoulders when it feels sad and raises its arms for a hug when it feels happy.

It has been designed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child and is capable of forming bonds with people who treat it with kindness. Nao is able to detect human emotions through a series of non-verbal clues, such as body-language and facial expressions, and becomes more adept at reading a persons mood through prolonged interaction.

It uses video cameras to detect how close a person comes and sensors to work out how to react. It is also humanoid in form with a face arms and legs.

In other words it is programmed to respond in certain ways to certain conditions that occur in data strings. It is told by the human who programmed it how to react to certain things. Nao, as the robot is called, does not have feelings at all, it is an insensate machine that dumbly obeys instructions from it's programmer.

This is not surprising really, I have yet to meet a scientist who would recognise a human emotion it it ran up and headbutted him or her in the face. Inevitably after some scathing sarcasm from commentators the team responsible for designing and building this robot are now trying to deny the accusation that they claimed their creation had 'feelings.' "It was the public relations people who said that, not us sensible, objective scientists," they said.

Was it really. Building a robot that could "think for itself" or experience and express emotions has been an obsession with the kind of electronics R & D technicians who style themselves 'scientists' for decades. "A robot that can think and feel is only a couple of years away," they have claimed every two or three years since a team in the early sixties claimed that by 1980 housework would be a thing of the past because everybody will have housework robots to do the chores."
It is now 2010. Where's my fucking housework robot, I WANT IT NOW!

Put the assertion that it is the unscientific public relations people (nasty, arty-fary non mathematical types) who made these outrageous claims that Nao has feelings) into perspective. Was it the nasty, unscientific, arty-farty public relations people who built Nao with legs and arms and something resembling a face? Was it those silly, sentimental public relations people who programmed it to bow its head and let its shoulders slump when its operator ignores it or speaks sharply? I think not.

A robot does not need a sensor panel resembling a face in order to function. Arms can't be improved on but unless a device needs to tackle rough terrain, a ploughed field or a rocky beach for example, there are more efficient ways of getting around than legs. So why make it like a human? Robots purpose built by engineers in machine assembly plants carry out far more complex tasks without a face or software that enables them to perform like a very incompetent mine artist. Those industrial robots work tirelessly and efficiently which is what we require from machines. They do not have to resemble human beings in any way.

Nao is yet another example of science trying to play god by creating life or something resembling it in the laboratory or workshop.

RELATED POSTS:Google and the Surveillance Society Just how much data are Google gathering on private individuals? And are other internet and hi - tech firms far behind in their efforts to trash our private lives and force us all to live online in full view of the world. This article reports how far the internet has gone in letting fascistic corporations ride roughshod over privacy laws.Self Driving Cars Are The Latest Dehumanizing Development
Don't be evil, that's Google's job. The world's greatest corporate Nazis are always eager to promote the latest dehumanizing technological advance. The most recent project they revealed from a long line of technologies aimed at cutrailing our ability to think for ourselves and make our own choices is the self driving car. No doubt the Evil Empire will sell this as something to keep us safe and ...

Apple Launches Its iPerv App
Apple launched the latest App for its gadgets this week, a bit of software that monitors internet connections for signs of paedophiles trying to contact kids. If it is not called the iPerv App it should be. We foresee problems however. It will take the average kid about five seconds to learn how to disable it

Segway Into Insanity
Even as the case for global warming made by climate change science crumbles, the green get rich quick schemes get nuttier and nuttier. Take the Segway electric scooter being promoted by former MP Lembit Opik. This mode of ecofriendly transport technology is neither green, safe nor practical but it is advertized as all three.

A-level pass? Computer Says No
What happened when a computer programme was set to marking English A - level examination papers? Well it wasn't literature.

11 August 2010
Today's News

The stalling economic recovery and pictures of a new distant galaxy where astrophysicists can see new stars being formed are the main stories that attracted our attention in this almost news free day...

Bank Warns UK Recovery Will Be Weak
Economic expansion will peak at 3pc next year, weaker than the 3.6pc the Bank was expecting just three months ago. Today's August Inflation Report also warned that inflation will remain higher than its 2pc target for much of next year.
Mervyn King, the Bank's Governor, said at a press conference in London that while "the UK recovery is likely to continue, the overall outlook is weaker," than at the time of the Bank's last forecast in the spring. These predictions underline the dilemma facing the government's ...

The galaxy, titled NGC 4911, lies more than 320 million light-years away in the "Coma Cluster" of about 1,000 galaxies and islands of stars similar to the Milky Way. (follow link above for pictures and full story)

Nasa said the stunning long-exposure picture, titled Island Universe, shows the majestic face-on spiral galaxy in the northern constellation Coma Berenices amid a sea of stars. The galaxy contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its centre and is silhouetted against glowing newborn star clusters and iridescent pink clouds of hydrogen, which indicates ongoing star formation.

The circular structure, found at a site near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, has been dated as being made in 8,500BC.

Described as a "sensational discovery" by archaeologists, this is 500 years older than the previous oldest house.

The teams from the universities of Manchester and York are also examining

10August 2010
Today's News

The stories that interested us today. Topic covered are the Pakistan floods and climate factors, University places, gay marriage, war in Afghanistan and federalisation of the Eurpoean Union :

Supercharged Jetstream Causing Pakistan Floods
We have argued many times that what causes scepticism about science is the simple minded tendency among scientists to reduce everything to mathematics. Take climate science for example. If somebody comments on the weather the scientists will sneeringly point out that weather and climate are not the same.

Listen to them and they will have you thinking weather is all about sun and wind, rain, snow and hail while climate is about statistics, equations and graphs. Weather and climate are inexorably linked however. The current weather in Pakistan, the torrential rains which are causing catastrophic floods, are a direct result of the behaviour of one of the most influential factors in shaping climate, the jet stream. The climate catastrophe is explained in the report from the Daily Telegraph:

Any sane person is against the push to federalisation of the EU, a single European superstate and beyond that to the One world, one government" thinking of Nazis like Barack Obama, Tony Blair and the members of the notorious Bilderberg Group.

One think the British government and the governments of other European Nations with large economies have always resisted is cedeing the right to set taxes to the bureau rats of Brussels. Control Freakery being what it is however the rats keep gnawing at that resistance and now, with governments under pressure as the global economy slides into depression and slump and the Bilderberg Group having forged an unholy alliance between global financial interests, the academic and political elites and politicians gredy for power and wealth we are more vulnerable to global Naziism than ever.

Afghan Civilian Deaths Up By A Third
As the death toll in this pointless war cintinues to mount it becomes more and more clear the "coalition of the willing" is losing. But hen nobosy ever won a war in Afghanistan. If only politicians would read some history books.

If somebody suggested putting career criminals in charge of the police force and the courts sane people would, would they not, be horrified. Yet this is exactly what internet search Nazis Google and telecom giant Verizon are proposing. We all know Google have displyed fascistic tendencies in blocking website that oppose the political postition the company supports and that they are secretive about what information they steal from us and what they do with it.

And yet, for all we know about Google's malfeasance, politicians are willing to listen when Google proposes a method of regulating the web that will do little to protect individual users from cybercrime and bullying but will suit Google and Verizon's business models very well and will make it much easier for governments to control information. (also reported in Google and Verizon's net carve up)

'Full Universities Turn Away Record Numbers Of PupilsAgain, 'We told you so.' With few jobs available for school leavers in the private sector pupils are being pushed more and more towards Higher Edeucation to keep them off the unemployment statistics. Better they should learn to cope with disappointment now though than waste thre years, leave University with a Mickey Mouse degree and a massive debt and then face long term unemployment.

... this ruling does nothing more than enshrine the notion that what has always been the definition for marriage can no longer be the definition for marriage, because defining marriage as it has always been defined is discriminatory against those who wish it was defined in a way more to their liking, and in a way that changes what it is and has always been into something it never was nor ever has been. But be that as it may. I've tired of writing about this, frankly. I'm not so much in the business of seeking to deprive people rights --- contrived rights, be that as it may as well --- and I'm to the point where the only legitimate solution I see would be a federalist one, to let the voters in their own states decide how they want to define marriage. The courts will not reflect the people on this, and the law will be tweaked to extend the right to marry to a faction that's not interested in ...

9 August 2010
Iceberg Alley Blues.
by Ian R Thorpe

We must stop using oil say the politicians and scientists as it becomes more imperative that exploration begins in Iceberg Alley off the Canadian Coast, elsewhere in the Arctic and in other sensitive locations. They are just trying to soften us up for carbon taxes of course. Nobody knows better than politicians that the world runs on oil and that alternative non polluting sources are a long way short of being able to supply energy needs ...read allIceberg Alley Blues

9 August 2010
Today's News
Today we beging a new feature, a roundup of news stories that have attracted our attention. This is not a comprehensive guide nor it it a news aggregation service, it is just links to the items we find interesting.

No, I'm not talking about a new Nissan or Toyota model launch. Cars fuelled by methane produced from shit have been around a long time but because of various technical problems were not a viable proposition for commercial production. Now a team of engineers claim they have developed a conversion technology so efficient drivers will no longer be able to tell the difference between a shit powerd car and one that uses conventional fuel.

Except for the farty smell from the exhaust maybe?

Swiss Do Well Out Of Europe
As the Eurozone struggles with the PIIGS crisis Britain is squeezed between the voracious Eurofederalist beast that wants to swallow our nation, our culture and our independence and our over reliance on American investment foisted on us by incompetent, treasonous Prime Ministers during the thirteen years of Labour misrule. It is good then to read of a European nation doing well. Switzerland which has guarded its currency and political identity from the imperialist tendencies of the EU and America is enjoying an era of great prosperity as the rest of the world weathers the economic storm.

"The worlds first robot to be able to display and detect emotions has been unveiled by European scientists. The humanoid machine, called Nao, hunches its shoulders when it feels sad and raises its arms for a hug when it feels happy.

It has been designed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child and is capable of forming bonds with people who treat it with kindness. Nao is able to detect human emotions through a series of non-verbal clues, such as body-language and facial expressions, and becomes more adept at reading a persons mood through prolonged interaction.

It uses video cameras to detect how close a person comes and sensors to work out how..."
In other words it is programmed to respond in certain ways to certain conditions that occur in data strings. It is told by the human who programmed it how to react to certain things. Nao, as the robot is called, does not have feelings at all, it is an insensate machine that dumbly obys instructions from it's programmer.

This is not surprising really, I have yet to meet a scientist who would recognise a human emotion it it ran up and headbutted im in the face.

Teachers, social workers and nurses would be forced to pay thousands of pounds more for their university degrees if ministers replaced tuition fees with a graduate tax, according to a report today.

The University and College Union (UCU) findings suggest that relatively low earners, such as nurses and teachers, would pay thousands of pounds more if a graduate tax was introduced.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, last month floated the idea of a tax tied to earnings, through which low earners would pay less than they now do for their degrees while those with high incomes

Yeah but, no but - we thought getting a degree opened the gateway to a glittering career with high earnings, professional respect and job security among the many rewards. Could it be the coalition are coming to terms with the reality that we are producing too many graduates for the number of graduate jobs available.

This is, is it not, what the Daily Stirrer has been trying to tell them since we started publishing.

The Labour Party, the progressive left as they like to style themselves is obsessed with rights. They are convinced the major political priorities in this country concerncivil rights (including the right on Muslims to mutilate their daughter's genitals and the right of Muslim men to rape their wives. Senior labour figures have recently supported both of these "inalienable human rights" though both would be crimes for follwers of any religion exept Islam.

Before being dumped out of office the rights obsessed Labour Leadership (Harriet Harperson to be exact) dumped on British businesses and the general public by passing the equalities bills. This farrago of misbegotten ideology was born out of self righteousness and vindictiveness. It denies employers and organisations the right to a fair hearing when complaints of discrimination are made against them. Under the terms of the act if a member of an ethnic, sexual or religious minority or someone marginalised by physical disability or mental illness feels they have been discriminated against no counter argument is permissible. The minority member feels they have been unfairly treated because of their minority group status: case proven.
Madame justice has removed her blindfold and jointed the Politicall Correct Thought Police.
Among the other "rights" Labour talked of but did not manage to enshrine in the legal codex was the right of everybody to attend univrersity. Single figure IQ? Can't read and write? Want a degree? No problem, if you want a degree it is your right to attend university for thre years at taxpayers' expense and be awarded one. What about attending lectures and tutorioals, writing essays, submitting course work? Forget it, those things are a monstrous violation of your rights.
If the people who call themselves progressive liberals or the progessive left would stop and try to think for a moment, it would hurt their head a lot they would perhaps get an inkling that their ideology is nothing to do with fairness or equaility. Placing certain groups above or beyond the law can never be fair. It is the social policy on which tyranny is founded.